About Me

My first novel, Beauty for Ashes, was published by Wings ePress in 2007. My second was published in Summer 2011 by the Arts Council funded organisation YouWriteOn.com but subsequently withdrawn. St Martin's Summer will be published by Wings ePress next May (2018). I've now started work on a trilogy of historical novels set in the fourteenth century. The first of a series of time travelling girl-and-pony stories is waiting for a publisher. I've been married since 1977, and we have two daughters, the big one (35) and the little one (16) - although actually the little one is now taller than the big one!

Monday, 6 July 2015

Go with the drachma

Amazing scenes in
Greece this morning, though perhaps the celebrations may be short-lived when it
dawns on them that saying “No” to European bailout conditions may not actually
help them to escape the even more grinding austerity which they very
understandably wish to avoid. I’m glad to see that some commentators are now
laying the blame as much on the Eurozone and the IMF as on the Greek
government, as seems only fair. The comment by a Manchester University
professor on the BBC this morning, that it represented “a catastrophic failure
of strategy on both sides” seems a most apt description.

However, where now?
I can’t help feeling that if the Eurozone leaders could swallow their pride and
consult with British finance ministers (after all, we have managed to prosper
within the EU but outside the Eurozone, without any particular desire or
prospect of joining the euro in the foreseeable future), we might see some new ideas.
Why should the Greeks not go back to the drachma, for example, thus giving them much more
freedom of manoeuvre to manage their own financial affairs and more sense of national sovereignty, and yet stay in the
European Union? They would still be heavily in debt, and
bankruptcy is not an option one would wish on anyone (see Iceland for details),
but at least they would no longer be locked in to European-imposed policies
that clearly do not have the support of the Greek people, and which just as
clearly are not working (a five years’ austerity programme really should have
shown dividends by now if the policy was going to succeed, it seems to me).
There would be something to aim for, and it is clear that Greek independence
and desire for dignity is an important factor that perhaps the EU has failed to
take into account.

But will the
Eurozone let them go? Not willingly, it is clear. Failure for Greece would
probably make it more likely that other countries currently on or fairly near
the brink would also fall out of the zone, and that increases the risk that the
euro itself would finally fail. What that would mean no one quite dares to
think. Not to mention the fact that once free of their eurozone shackles the
Greeks might cozy up to dangerous players such as Russia, whose restive
unpredictability the EU fears perhaps above all else.

Interesting times,
certainly! Whatever decision is taken by the Greeks, there are dangers both for
them and for others. But that is always true, at all times and in all
circumstances. I wish them well.